The Best Evidence for the Falseness of Modernity

When a Marxist atheist like the late Christopher Hitchens says he opposes religion because he wants man to be "free," we know exactly what he means. He means that he wants to destroy the natural order of being because it imposes on man duties and obligations he is not free to choose or avoid. He is, in some sense, declaring war on God -- and thus on reality itself. He doesn't merely object to political tyranny. He objects to (what he sees as) the tyranny imposed on him by biology, by the circumstances of birth, by his own nature as a human being. "Freedom" for him is the total freedom of his will, unfettered even by the material facts of reality.

All this makes sense to us. We recognize it for what it is: rebellion against God, as old and uninteresting as the demons which inspired it.

But it makes no sense to him. Our talk of God and the natural order of being sounds like gibberish to him, and he responds to it as if it were gibberish, with a kind of frustrated dismissal and gasping irritation. The best he can come up with as to why people don't see the world as he does or experience reality in the same way he does is that they're just stupid, irrational, superstitious, or dishonest (but he will continue to say, always, that reason is enough, that man is a reasonable creature, and he will never reconcile this in his head with the fact that, by his own standard, the vast majority of man is irrational); and he will continue to believe it even as he meets plenty of intelligent, reasonable, and diligent people who disagree with him.

This is a serious, glaring deficiency on the part of the modern mode of being: it cannot account for the fullness of the human experience, even as the reactionary mode of being can -- and does.

The whole modern mode of being is such a stupidly rickety thing, hastily slapped and bandaged together, gushing steam from its joints and creaking noisily as it stumbles blindly through the world. Nothing but ignorance of and dishonesty about its own nature keeps it going. So radically deficient. And that which is deficient cannot last: entropy will claim it before long.

1 Comment

I am continuing to grapple with that remarkable book The Master and his Emissary by Iain McGilchrist - specifically the chapter The Triumph of the Left Hemisphere - and it is like reading the same description as the above with hemispheres exchanged for political perspectives.

Ineradicable error due to precise incompleteness which cannot perceive or even conceive its own error - the Emissary Left hemisphere usurping its natural Master on the Right (which perceives the whole Gestalt of the situation, but with less precision than the Left).

Perhaps this is the deep and real meaning behind the political division into Left and Right (only kidding ;-) ).